Using HubSpot for Account Based Prospecting

Account-based prospecting isn’t exactly a new term on the block. But it’s recently gained traction from organisations as they realise the value it brings in helping sales teams book more meetings. ABP feeds into your Sales enablement strategy by offering the strategy and tools to sell more effectively.   

What is account-based prospecting?

Account-based prospecting (ABP) is a highly personalised outreach strategy where a sales team focuses their resources on selling to a group of high-value accounts. 

Rather than looking to sell just to individuals, you look at the organisation as a whole. It’s about finding the businesses that align with your ideal customer profile and engaging in hyper-targeting prospecting with highly personalised messages.

How to implement ABP: 

Step 1: Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The key to success with this approach is identifying the right accounts to target. A well-defined ICP enables you to develop targeting messaging based on a set of specific traits and characteristics. 

We’ve built a free ICP template that you can use for your account-based prospecting. The more specific your ICP is, the more accurate your targeting will be. 

Step 2: Develop Your Account Targeting Strategy

The next step is to identify those key stakeholders and deem each of them as key decision makers. For example, you may choose to target the VP of marketing, the marketing manager, EMEA Marketing manager and NAM marketing manager - all of these should be considered key decision makers by your sales team. 

The goal is account coverage and high penetration. Ideally, you’ll want to identify a list of: 

• A large number of accounts within your target market 
• A large number of key personnel from each target account. 
  
  

Now, you might have a pretty big long list… The key here is to refer back to your ICP. Within that list you generated, you’ll want to prioritize accounts based on the companies that best fit your ICP. 

Step 3: Develop your sales message

The key to account-based prospecting is treating each company as one target account. That means your messaging must address the needs of the company. You then need to add in an additional step of personalising each message to the stakeholders within those companies. 

How HubSpot powers your ABP strategy

Once you’ve established your ICP and have identified your target accounts, it’s time to start leveraging the people, processes, and technology to execute your ABP strategy.

1. Import the account data into HubSpot
2. Create your target ABP company and contact list 
3. Create a unique sales sequence for each target account, leaving room for personalisation. You should be using both personalisation tokens, in addition to adding personalised messages. 
4. Conduct testing - you should be testing out the number of sales sequences used, which channels you use for outreach, time of day, etc. 
5. Setup a reporting dashboard dedicated to ABP